


Ruining History: The Strange Life of Shane Madej

by genericghouligan



Series: Demon Shane [3]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Ancient Rome, Bears, Demon Shane Madej, Gen, Historical, Philosophy, Renaissance Era, Star Wars References, War, Witch Hunts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 17:31:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16433771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genericghouligan/pseuds/genericghouligan
Summary: Shane, before he was Shane, and after.





	Ruining History: The Strange Life of Shane Madej

**Author's Note:**

> If you read the tags and are confused: fair.

"Vercingetorix. My friend. You keep this up and the whole city is gonna starve."

"And if we surrender, what then?"

Shane sighs. "I'm not saying surrender, but some decisive action - or at least talk to Caesar! These Romans, they're obsessed with money, resources, glory, their gods-forsaken walls and roads - surely you can offer them something. A mine! A mine, in exchange for a temporary truce, just enough time for us to get reinforcements and double cross em, make the whole thing moot."

"I will not negotiate with these southern dogs. They can sit at their walls. The others will be here soon."

"Not soon enough. The dead they killed in their pits and traps, their restless spirits have poisoned the earth, people are dying." Shane reaches out and grabs the general's arm before he can turn away. "Alesia let you in when you had an army of Romans biting at your heels. Are you going to reward them with a slow death? What example does that set to other potential allies?"

Vercingetorix sighs. "Argransu," he says, "you continue you to be a pain in your ass with your constant logic."

"Thank you," Shane says.

"We will send the women and children out of the gates, to ask the Romans for passage."

"General - the mercy of the Romans is rarely much mercy."

"Then at least it will not be a slow death."

And Shane - Argransu, they're calling him in those days - can't argue with that.

* * *

 

Shane props his chin in his hand as Giordano talks. He likes this guy, who has ideas about the universe, about other planets revolving around other suns, and how there is only up and down in relation to the world around you, and the importance of seeking truth over believing what everyone else does.

Some of what he says is absolutely batshit insane, and Shane likes those bits best.

"You always listen to my lectures and never contribute," Giordano accuses, when he reaches Shane's place in the back of the hall.

"You alienate everyone well enough without my help," Shane fires back. "You should cite Digges, if you are going to follow his claim that the universe is infinite."

"Must I cite that which is obvious to all who take a moment to think?"

"Yes," Shane says, "this is academia. John will print anything, of course, but for pity's sake, man."

"You don't invoke the divine," he says.

Shane rolls his eyes. "Don't deflect just because you know I'm right."

"The truth will always anger the people in power, Jack. How else will they maintain control of the masses, if they do not suppress free thought? But not you. You, my friend, are irrepressible. Why is that?"

"I'm just a smart man."

"A smart man who places no faith in the divine."

Shane shrugs. "I haven't seen proof. And you, my friend, are hardly one to talk."

* * *

 "A bear," Shane says flatly. And then, looking at the hope dying in the exhaustion-ringed eyes of the soldiers, "Sure, I can train bears."

He does not know how to train bears. He's been around bears, and elephants, and camels, and cats of all sizes, from the thick-furred ones that don't rise as high as his knees and keep the camp here free of mice, to enormous sleek lionesses who walked alongside Siluia in Tarchna's streets, he's seen a lot of cats. And of course everyone keeps dogs, hunting dogs, guard dogs, strange little dogs.

But bear training?

"Siad, Wojtek. Ah, you fucking - siad! See?" Shane squats down, and the cub looks at him.

"You have to give him a cigarette," someone says.

He looks up. One of the soldiers is there, leaning over the side of the makeshift pen. He's one of the ones who brought the cub to camp.

"He likes cigarettes. And they have to be lit."

"Aw, you're kidding me," Shane says. "You got him hooked on those things?"

"They're good for what ails you."

"They're expensive as hell," Shane says. "Fucking impossible to get fucking tobacco out here in the fucking - fine. Okay. Stój, Wojtek!"

Wojtek tilts his head. Shane is pretty sure his heart is melting.

* * *

 The people are pounding on the gates. Shane can't sleep. There are babies crying, and women screaming curses and pleas in turns.

Vercingetorix isn't sleeping either, but Shane cannot find that a relief. "Let them back in!" He snarls. "They're going to starve!"

"They will starve inside the city or outside it. Why allow their spirits to spread disease?"

"You said - you agreed. They don't deserve a slow death. You can still leverage the Romans - I'll talk to them myself, if you don't want to risk your men. Just do something."

"Why do you care?"

It's a good question. "I can't sleep with them out there making a racket," he says. "And I don't think it's very just."

"Ah, the man concerns himself with justice. What care will the Romans have for justice?"

"Damn the Romans. Balance is important," Shane says. He can feel himself growing angry. Properly angry. The kind of angry that makes it hard "You do bad things, and bad things happen to you. You intrude upon the hospitality of a town and then turn them out to die, and evil befalls you. It's balance."

"Are you threatening me? Advisor or not, I will have your head placed on a spike, Argransu. Don't you forget that I'm the general."

"Don't you forget," he says harshly, "why you chose me to advise you."

"You deny at every turn that the forest gods favored you."

"They don't. I don't need any god's help to make myself a nuisance. And I swear to you, if you do not save them, I will make sure you suffer a most humiliating end."

"And what of the Romans?"

"Oh," Shane says, "I'll be sure that this Iulius fellow suffers too."

* * *

 "Fifteen years, and you haven't changed a bit," Giordano says.

Shane glares at him. "Now is not the time, Gio. Now is the time to be panicking because they're going to kill you."

"I don't fear death."

"You don't - everyone fears death! It's the fundamental truth of the human condition!"

"Does that mean you do not?"

"You and your theories," says Shane.

"It seems disingenuous, my old friend, to pretend that the truth is mere supposition. Especially now."

"Don't talk like that. You're not going to die. You're coming with me. I've got a friend in Prussia, she'll help us."

"I'm not leaving."

"You'll like her, she's got this great - wait. What? No. Gio, come on."

"I'm staying."

"That may be the most foolish thing you've said in a long history of foolish utterances."

"I will not flee Rome a coward and survive. Better to face my fate a philosopher and truly live."

"Being burnt at the stake - it's an awful death, Gio. And it will prove nothing. They will burn your writings with you."

"Just as they burned the writings of Erasmus?"

"I'm not going to stay and watch you kill yourself for ego!"

"Then you picked the wrong friend," Giordano says, "all those years ago."

"Maybe I did," Shane says, but Giordano doesn't believe him, and neither does he.

"We'll meet again."

"I don't believe you."

"I know."

* * *

 The battle is turning, and the Romans are starting to fall.

Shane kills a half a dozen Gauls before one of them turns to him. "Who the hell are you?" He asks, eyes narrowed under his helmet.

"What are you talking about?" Shane asks innocently. "I've been here the whole time."

The Romans win. Shane studies the face of their general as he gives a victory speech. When they meet again he wants to be sure that this man gets his due for what he did to the townspeople.

* * *

 The battle is going badly. Shane grits his teeth against the headache the retort of the guns on all sides is giving him. And then something occurs to him.

It's a risk to release Wojtek, but the first handful of enemy soldiers who see Shane, a handful of others from the 22nd, and an enormous bear come barreling towards them? They prove pretty effectively that it was a good call.

The tides of the battle turn.

Shane helps move the wounded back to camp, and Wojtek lopes along behind him, sniffing with what almost seems like concern at the bloodied limbs.

Shane thinks for a moment that the bear is better than most of the humans he's met. He can't deny he's met some good humans, of course. But most of them were killed in vicious ways by other humans, directly or indirectly, and as the second iteration of what was supposed to the war to end all wars drags on, he can't help but think, bears.

He could stand to be around more bears.

* * *

 Shane smuggles dozens of copies of Giordano's books away from Rome, and then keeps it up when he finds that England has become similarly inhospitable under the reign of this James fellow, who's very much concerned about demons and witches.

Considering Shane kind of wants to kill the guy, he's not far off. But he's learned his lesson about interfering with leaders of budding empires.

* * *

 Caesar is still bleeding, sluggish and warm and crimson, on the floor of the Curia, when someone says, "Who will succeed him?"

And oh, no. No, this was supposed to avert the dangerous path Caesar was on towards a line of succession.

"The consuls," Antonius says, but even he doesn't sound certain.

Shakespeare gets this bit wrong. It's not Cassius who had the lean and hungry look. It's the man they can't quite remember, with the Greek name. Or was it Judean?

* * *

 The twentieth century is terrible and wonderful and Shane spends a lot of time trying to decide if he wants to bother with humanity anymore anyway. He goes to Chicago, where he's looking for the granddaughter of one of the men who knew him as Aleksey Gniewek, assistant bear trainer. He finds her, but all it does is make him sad and nostalgic, and he slips back out of the shop where she works.

He wanders his way out to the suburbs, and finds himself walking in Woodfield Mall.

There's a kid there with his friends. Something in his face reminds Shane of long marches through Egypt and Iran. Polish, he thinks. This kid has some Polish in him.

"I wish I had a little brother or sister," he's saying. "It's just me. S'okay, I guess."

Shane hasn't been a child in a very long time. But it's the 90's, now. Kids are getting a lot more rights and cool shit than they used to. Skateboards, for instance, assuming he can get his humanoid limbs to cooperate.

He follows the boy home and up rhe steps to the house and suddenly the boy blinks and says, "Who are you?"

"What are you talking about?" Shane says. "I've been here the whole time. I'm your little brother."

Finn Madej smiles toothily. "Yeah, you are. Come on, dork, let's see what's for dinner."

And Shane smiles.

* * *

 "You don't know what happens to people when they die," Ryan insists, and Shane thinks about Giordano and his transmigration theory.

He still thinks it's bullshit, of course.

But in a way, he can't deny that the dead have a way of living on.

Genetics, of course, and chance, and wishful thinking. But he can't help thinking about the many long centuries that stretch behind him as Ryan talks with his hands, his eyes alight with some stupid idea, and the Paddington bear on his desk and he thinks, balance. Balance. Skeptics and believers. Atrocities and justice. The past and the present.

"Dude. You're so zoned out. What are you thinking about?"

"The Force Awakens," Shane says, and thinks about _if you live long enough you see the same eyes in different people_.

**Author's Note:**

> Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600 in Campo de' Fiori and he predicted quite a bit of what is now regarded as scientific fact. There is a statue erected where he was killed that still stands today. If you ever visit Rome, the Campo de' Fiori is worth a visit. He also believed in a form of reincarnation, and refused to recant his heresies even when facing a horrible death. 
> 
> Woodfield Mall is a real place in Schaumburg Illinois. It is the largest mall in Illinois. If you're ever in Illinois - honestly, you can give it a miss. It's just a mall. 
> 
> Most of the 22nd did not return to Poland after the war ended. I don't know if any of them had a granddaughter who lived in Chicago in the 1990's. Wojtek was not trained, on any official record at least, by anyone called Aleksey Gniewek. Aleksey is a form of Alexander. 
> 
> "Argransu" comes from three proto indo european roots, arg- for silver/white, ghreu- for to grow, and ansu- for spirit/demon. I imagined someone seeing Shane emerge from the woods, tall and pasty, and assume he was some weird birch tree spirit, though Vercingetorix merely believes Shane is a special human.
> 
> Shane is an Irish form of John; Jack is an old nickname for John, which Giordano uses far too casually, just as Shane calls him Gio.
> 
> If there are any historical inaccuracies, well, it's a Buzzfeed Unsolved fanfiction.
> 
> As ever, my Tumblr is also GenericGhouligan. Come talk to me.


End file.
